Jerwood Painting Prize

The six British artists are Peter Archer, Ian Davenport, Marta Marce, Tim Renshaw, Katie Pratt and Basil Beattie.

Marta Marce's colourful abstract images are crisp and sharp renditions of shapes while Tim Renshaw's works showing detail sheets of patterns can be compared to enlarge creations of magnified silicon chips.

Katie Pratt's works are intricate and textured revealing the smooth and the rough with globules of thick lumps of paint thrown amidst honeycomb and pixelized-effect patterns. Basil Beattie's large stairway configurations are stamped upon the canvas displaying rectangular blocks piled upon blocks and demonstrating thick brush strokes and copious use of paint. Ian Davenport's creations are large flat expanses of colours and are only slightly comparable to stained glass.

While all these images have beauty and merits of their own I was deeply impressed by the works of Peter Archer whose oil paintings stand as the only realistic representations in a field of abstracts creations. His works convey a dark and eerie beauty that captures the landscape with haunting and atmospheric overtones combined with decaying urban structures and go deeper to show the mixing of nature and the man-made.

The exhibition continues until June at the Jerwood Space.